A top-ranking member of the Nuestra Familia prison gang has been indicted by a federal grand jury on murder, conspiracy and racketeering charges in connection with the stabbing deaths of two people found in a burning Oakland apartment.

The bodies of Navaerette and Washington were found in a second-floor apartment on the 3100 block of Coolidge Avenue in Oakland early Sept. 11, 2011, after firefighters doused a blaze there.

Autopsies determined that both had been stabbed to death.

Cervantes allegedly enlisted Shane Bowman and Jaime Cervantes, said to be gang members, to destroy evidence at the murder scene, according to the indictment handed down earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Oakland.

Bowman, Jaime Cervantes and a third alleged gang associate, Richard Martinez, set fire to the apartment "to destroy evidence from the double murder committed the previous day by Henry Cervantes," said the indictment, which names seven other defendants.

If convicted of the murder charges, Henry Cervantes could face a minimum sentence of life in prison or the death penalty. He is being held without bail at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.

In 2004, Henry Cervantes was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after being convicted of a racketeering conspiracy. He was released in April 2010. By 2011, he had become the "regiment commander" of the Nuestra Familia in Oakland, "responsible for overseeing the criminal activities of his regiment," the indictment said.

Federal prosecutors said top officers of Nuestra Familia issued orders to their associates on the streets from inside the security housing unit at California's toughest lockup, Pelican Bay State Prison.

Navaerette also spent time behind bars. He was convicted of second-degree murder and being a felon in possession of a gun for fatally shooting a man in 1981 in Oakland in a dispute over heroin. Navaerette was paroled in 2010.